Not Your Conventional Convention: A New Look at the Annual Meeting

Lee W. Formwalt

If we learned nothing else from our experience in St. Louis this past spring, it was just how important the annual meeting is to the Organization of American  Historians.  Aside from the publication of The Journal of American History, the annual meeting is the most significant of the OAH's many functions.

Some historians and scholars in other disciplines have raised questions about the necessity of the annual meeting.  With the new means of electronic communication now available to professional historians, scholarship, including the JAH, is disseminated on the web. Many historians now communicate with their colleagues via electronic rather than "snail" mail and conversations among historians are carried electronically on listservs and in chat rooms.  Other historians have questioned the value of large professional meetings which can be alienating experiences for new members of the profession who know few of their colleagues.

Yet, in both St. Louis and Ames, Iowa, where the OAH Midwestern Regional Conference was held in August, we heard from members who saw great value in the face to face contact at regional and annual meetings.  In much the same way that distance learning will supplement but never completely replace the traditional classroom with live professors and students, so the new technology will enhance historians' communications, but never replace the experience of communicating directly to colleagues sitting in the same room.

Convinced that the annual meeting is here to stay, we have set about improving it so that it can be most effective in enhancing both the historian's scholarship and her professional life. Starting with the annual meeting in Los Angeles, we will have a series of concurrent regional receptions the opening night of the meeting.  Sponsoring these events are book publishers and history departments. Hosting each regional gathering will be the OAH executive board members from that region. At the receptions, members will be able to meet and talk with their hosts, an opportunity members welcomed at the Midwestern Regional Conference this summer. The regional receptions will downsize the largeness of the annual meeting, allow members from the same or nearby states to meet or renew friendships, and provide new members or members coming to their first annual meeting the opportunity to meet colleagues they may encounter over the next several days. More important, they will have established contacts with colleagues on whom they can call after they return to their home institution.

Another innovation at Los Angeles will be Sunday morning chat rooms. Taking a cue from the electronic media we use so regularly, we will have available a number of rooms devoted to a variety of topics that members can step into and join in on the conversation.  Due to the cheaper airline tickets that come with a Saturday night stayover, we anticipate many members will be in L.A. Sunday morning waiting for their departing flight. Chat rooms allow members to continue discussions they may have started earlier or to begin new conversations they can continue online. For more information on the Sunday morning chat rooms, see the information at right.

At the Midwestern Regional Conference we offered a number of "state of the art" sessions to update historians in the historiography of various fields. These sessions were especially useful to the many professors attending from four-year institutions with heavy course loads and little opportunity after graduate school to keep up in fields outside their specialty. Leading historians in different fields brought attendees up to date discussing the important issues that historians were researching and debating. Although it was too late to incorporate a number of state of the art sessions into the L.A. program, we do plan to have at least one with the hope of including several in future years.  State of the art sessions will add an important element of professional development and cross-field connectedness to our normal complement of scholarly panels.

Another important contribution to professional development will be our second annual Graduate Student Welcome Breakfast.  As the newest members of our profession, graduate students may feel the most overwhelmed by the annual meeting.  The breakfast, free to all attending graduate students, provides an opportunity to meet each other and engage in dialogue with the OAH leadership. The president, executive director, and JAH editor will each speak briefly and then entertain questions and comments from the students.

The importance of conversation, not only between historians, but also with book publishers, was made very clear last spring in St. Louis.  When we transformed a university gymnasium into an exhibit hall, we took extra pains to ensure that publishers were able to connect with attending historians.  In addition to the space for booths, we provided a lounge area in the middle of the exhibit hall were people could stop, grab a bite, and talk with colleagues and publishers.  Almost an afterthought, the exhibit hall lounge area turned out to be a very popular feature. We have arranged to continue providing this convenient setting in Los Angeles and at future meetings.

Another opportunity that allows historians to continue their discussions outside the sessions is the relatively new dine-around program. Members sign up to go out to dinner at one of the many interesting Los Angeles restaurants with a group of a dozen or so historians, including someone from L.A. In Ames, I had my first dine-around experience and it was delightful--good food, good conversations, and more networking.

Building on our theme this year "Connections: Rethinking our Audiences" we plan to take advantage of our presence in Los Angeles and bring some of the very best American history to the students in schools, colleges, and universities there. We will be making arrangements for our OAH Distinguished Lecturers to give presentations at historical societies and other organizations in Los Angeles. OAH lectureships not only make some of the finest scholarship available to audiences, but they are also an important fundraiser for the organization. Executive board members who will already be in L.A. for the meeting will also go into the precollegiate schools to talk with middle and high school students about the value of history and the possibilities of careers in history. Many will be sharing their own stories of how they came to be historians.

The annual meeting will be familiar and comfortable to veteran members in every way. Yet it will also be new and improved. Already, you can check out the LA program on the OAH website <http://www.oah.org/meetings/2001/>.  Early next year you will find a redesigned Annual Meeting Program in the mail. Extra effort has been made to provide you with a user-friendly publication that will make it easier to navigate the meeting. This office is interested in any suggestions you may have to improve the way we meet our members' needs. We hope you will find the annual meeting in Los Angeles to be one of the most profitable in your career as an American historian.